CORONA-NORCO: Latino candidate provides test case

Mary Helen Ybarra has stepped into an opportune testing ground for civil rights activists to study whether minority voters in Corona and Norco are under-represented on school boards because of the way those elections are structured.

Ybarra is the first Latino candidate in recent history to run for the five-member Corona-Norco Unified School District board. The district has 49 schools and more than 53,000 students in Corona, Norco and Eastvale, unincorporated county areas and one school in Jurupa Valley.

Incumbents Cathy Sciortino and Michell Skipworth, who are white, and Jose Lalas, who is Filipino, are running for re-election in the Nov. 6 election. Ybarra is the only challenger.

School districts across the state, including Riverside Unified, are changing how they elect school board members. They are moving from at-large elections – in which candidates run across a whole district – to trustee area elections, in which they run in and represent a particular geographic area.

Critics blame at-large elections for disenfranchising minority voters at the local level because minority candidates often cannot win across an entire city or district. When districts divide into smaller areas, that allows Latino, or other minority communities, to elect a representative from their own neighborhoods, supporters say.

Corona-Norco school officials have said that, after an analysis of voting patterns, they don’t believe minority voters in the district are being disenfranchised.

But an analysis of statewide races suggests minorities in the district could be at a disadvantage. Some showed minority voters were more likely to cast ballots for minority candidates, and white voters for white candidates, according to a Press-Enterprise analysis of election data from the Statewide Database at UC Berkeley.

A look at a local election with candidates who had Latino surnames, showed little difference in the number of votes they received from Latino and non-white areas. In 2006, Sharon R. Martinez, who is white but married to a Latino, and Michael Martinez Scott, ran for the Corona-Norco school board.

The two collectively received about 42 percent of the vote in the heavily non-Hispanic areas, and about 48 percent of the vote in the heavily Latino areas, according to figures from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters office and the U.S. Census.

Ybarra said voters have encouraged her to run because she is Latino.

“They’re just saying that they’re really happy that I’m running” because I’m a minority, Ybarra said.

The 30-year Corona resident said she is not running on a Latino platform because she has experienced criticism when taking that stance.

“I don’t want to go on that platform because I don’t want to anger people,” Ybarra, 56, said. “I’m running for all the kids. I want to be able to be there for all the kids. I want people to view me as a representative for children.”

Civil rights attorney Robert Rubin, who is involved in the Riverside district issue, has said observers should pay attention to whether the minority community votes in a cohesive manner in the November race, and look at the ethnic makeup and voting patterns on a precinct level.

Until then, it’s unclear whether Latinos are at a disadvantage in the district, Rubin said.

Also contributing to this report: Staff writer Jim Miller, jmiller@pe.com